Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  In fact, what Sergio has observed and in some sense lived is less like a rain storm than a hurricane. His book, published as part of the Anagrama collection “Crónicas” that includes books by Wallraff, Kapuscinski, and Michael Herr, not only stands up to these legendary works but like them even breaks the rules of journalism as soon as it gets the chance in order to venture into the anti-novel, into first-person narrative, into open wounds, and even, in the last part, into lament. Thus instead of being just an imperfect snapshot of wrongdoing and corruption, as of course it must be, Huesos en el desierto becomes a metaphor for Mexico and the Mexican past and the uncertain future of all of Latin America. It’s a book not in the adventure tradition but in the apocalyptic tradition, which are the only two traditions still alive on our continent, maybe because they’re the only ones that draw us closer to the abyss that surrounds us.

  Yesterday, however, Sergio was at my house and the conversation was about lighter things. My daughter took ownership of Paola, the girl who came with him. Carolina served ham and cheese. We opened a bottle of wine. As a gift, Sergio brought me half a pound of coffee from my yearned-for and loathed coffee shop La Habana, on Calle Bucareli. Paola and Carolina smoked unfiltered Delicados. We remembered the old Pegaso buses of Mexico City’s public transportation system and we laughed. Then I was quiet and I thought that if ever I was in deep shit I would be all right so long as I had Sergio González Rodríguez by my side. Viva Mexico.

  84, CHARING CROSS ROAD

  Not many years ago I saw a movie on TV based on this book, although at the time I had no idea the book existed. It was very late, around four in the morning, and I only started watching partway through. Even so, I thought it was wonderful. To say that it was simple and restrained is too easy: it was, and the acting was excellent, but those clearly weren’t the most important things about it. Its main virtue, or at least so it seemed to me in that single viewing, was its open-endedness, a sketch-like quality that encouraged the viewer to fill in the blanks with two or three or ten imaginary movies that had nothing (or seemingly nothing) to do with what was happening on screen.

  A little while ago I came across the book — 84, Charing Cross Road (Anagrama, 2002) — on which the movie was based, and despite expectations, I thought the book was even better. Its author is Helen Hanff and the volume in question, which isn’t even one hundred pages long, is composed of the real letters that Miss Hanff, a poor Jewish New Yorker and would-be writer, sent to a bookseller in London in the years after World War II. At first the letters deal exclusively with book-related matters, but Miss Hanff soon gets herself involved in the lives of the clerks at the bookshop. How does she do this? By sending practical gifts, things like powdered eggs (news to me: I had no idea that powdered eggs were ever a popular item), ham, sugar, coffee; and even, in time, less practical gifts, like nylon stockings for the female clerks and the bookseller’s wife.

  These are gifts that touch the English (who are living under rationing) and touch the reader and establish a kind of kinship between Miss Hanff and her epistolary friends. Of course, the English also begin to send gifts to Miss Hanff: bedspreads or tablecloths, rare books, photographs. By this point, the reader, so as not to be left out, starts to cry, and if one wants to waste time examining one’s own tears, which isn’t advisable, one may discover a mysterious mechanism that also drives certain works by Dickens: the best tears are those that make us better and at the same time come closest to laughter.

  This book by the admirable Miss Hanff (Philadelphia 1918 - New York 1997) contains a few other curious details. For example, the demonstrable fact that she never bought a book without having first read it at the Public Library; which is to say that she was an even better re-reader than reader. And another: her absolute disdain for fiction, which was only tempered as she got older. Good evidence of this is 84, Charing Cross Road, in which all the letters written by her as well as those by her London correspondents are completely authentic, despite what is often the case in similar instances.

  A final detail: the bookshop Marks & Co., which dealt in used books and welcomed customers at 84 Charing Cross Road, doesn’t exist anymore. But its fair prices, its good practices in all matters bibliophilic, and the kindness of its employees survive in this book as an example for future booksellers and bookshops, two endangered species.

  JAUME VALLCORBA AND THE PRIZES

  Happy days for Jaume Vallcorba, founder of the Catalan-language publishing house Quaderns Crema and the Spanish-language publishing house El Acantilado, who has received good news. Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize, and until now no one had paid any attention to him except for Vallcorba, who is an expert in discovering hidden restaurants and strange books and writers. Actually, Vallcorba is an expert in many things.

  Once we were talking about Guiraut de Bornelh — a Provençal troubadour I thought I knew something about — and also Jaufré Rudel, and possibly even Marcabrú, when suddenly Vallcorba began to recite the three troubadours in the original Provençal and Occitan — even, I would say, with the proper period accents and regional variants in each case. This is the kind of thing that, suddenly sprung on someone, can be terrifying.

  I mean: his exhaustive knowledge of medieval and Latin literature, the tip of the massive iceberg that turns (sometimes harmoniously and sometimes chaotically) on that thing called European culture. But it’s enough to meet him for any wariness or fear to be dispelled. Culture, Jaume Vallcorba tells us in everything that he does, is play and risk (the play and risk of intelligence), and if in the end we don’t laugh, it’s frankly not worth the effort.

  That’s the only way to explain his list and the prestige that El Acantilado has attained in just a few years. Who if not Vallcorba would dare to publish Stefan Zweig or Schnitzler? Lafcadio Hearn, Braque, Satie? Who could have the fun of publishing Guido Ceronetti’s Song of Songs, or of reissuing Juan Ferraté’s Líricos griegos arcaicos [Archaic Greek Lyrics] when it was clear, or seemed clear, that the only people interested already owned the first edition, published ages ago by Seix Barral, and therefore wouldn’t buy his? Or most outrageous of all, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? But as I think about him now, while he’s in Stockholm as Kertész’s guest, the really amazing thing about Vallcorba is his attitude toward books, his tireless curiosity, his incredible modesty.

  This modesty only grew, if possible, when he was awarded this year’s prize for best editor in Spain. Which has done nothing to prevent him from continuing to visit bookstores as bizarre as the restaurants where he eats, or from talking to unpublished writers who other houses would write off in half a minute, or from embarking (stealthily but also boldly) on ventures of the sort that are only embarked upon, to the best of my knowledge, by Catalans, some Catalans. In fact, I’d go even further and say: some Catalan publishers.

  I’ve had the satisfaction of meeting three of them. One has taught me a lot. The other is an enchanting person, in the medieval sense of the term, as the long-suffering Rudel would have it. The third is Jaume Vallcorba. I can’t predict his fate, but I thank God for his presence. Not for my own sake, because I don’t believe in God and I’ve already done the reading I was meant to do, but for the sake of all readers. Though also for my own sake.

  TITIAN PAINTS A SICK MAN

  At the Uffizi, in Florence, is this odd painting by Titian. For a while, no one knew who the artist was. First the work was attributed to Leonardo and then to Sebastiano del Piombo. Though there’s still no absolute proof, today the critics are inclined to credit it to Titian. In the painting we see a man, still young, with long dark curly hair and a beard and mustache perhaps slightly tinged with red, who, as he poses, gazes off toward the right, probably toward a window that we can’t see, but still a window that somehow one imagines is closed, yet with curtains open or parted enough to allow a yellow light to filter into the room, a light that in time will become indistinguishable from the varnish on the painting.

  The young man’s fac
e is beautiful and deeply thoughtful. He’s looking toward the window, if he’s looking anywhere, though probably all he sees is what’s happening inside his head. But he’s not contemplating escape. Perhaps Titian told him to turn like that, to turn his face into the light, and the young man is simply obeying him. At the same time, one might say that all the time in the world stretches out before him. By this I don’t mean that the young man thinks he’s immortal. On the contrary. The young man knows that life renews itself and that the art of renewal is often death. Intelligence is visible in his face and his eyes, and his lips are turned down in an expression of sadness, or maybe it’s something else, maybe apathy, none of which excludes the possibility that at some point he might feel himself to be master of all the time in the world, because true as it is that man is a creature of time, theoretically (or artistically, if I can put it that way) time is also a creature of man.

  In fact, in this painting, time — sketched in invisible strokes — is a kitten perched on the young man’s hands, his gloved hands, or rather his gloved right hand which rests on a book: and this right hand is the perfect measure of the sick man, more than his coat with a fur collar, more than his loose shirt, perhaps of silk, more than his pose for the painter and for posterity (or fragile memory), which the book promises or sells. I don’t know where his left hand is.

  How would a medieval painter have painted this sick man? How would a non-figurative artist of the twentieth century have painted this sick man? Probably howling or wailing in fear. Judged under the eye of an incomprehensible God or trapped in the labyrinth of an incomprehensible society. But Titian gives him to us, the spectators of the future, clothed in the garb of compassion and understanding. That young man might be God or he might be me. The laughter of a few drunks might be my laughter or my poem. That sweet Virgin is my friend. That sad-faced Virgin is the long march of my people. The boy who runs with his eyes closed through a lonely garden is us.

  PAGES WRITTEN ON JACOB'S LADDER

  I’d like to buy all the books by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that I’ve read but I don’t own. Also everything by Daudet. And Victor Hugo. Sometimes I ask myself what I did with those books, how I could have lost them, where I lost them. Other times I ask myself why I want them if I’ve already read them, when reading books is the only way to hold on to them forever. The only plausible answer is that I want them for my children. But I know that’s not a fair answer: you have to leave home to find the books that are waiting for you.

  I still remember my old copy of Crime and Punishment, published in two columns (by Thor, of Buenos Aires) as if it were a work of pulp fiction, and maybe it was; a cheap book to read and then leave in a bus station or some café that doesn’t close until four in the morning. What did I do with that book? I don’t know. Probably the minute I read the last page it suddenly seemed less important and then I abandoned it somewhere. I didn’t treasure it the way I treasure my books now. But I read it when I was very young and I couldn’t lose Raskolnikov even if I wanted to.

  I had the same problem with Petrus Borel and De Quincy. And also Baudelaire (of whose Fleurs du mal I’ve owned more than ten copies) and Mallarmé. If I could find an old Argentine or Mexican edition of Igitur again, I know it would make me happy. I didn’t have the same problem with Rimbaud, or at least I didn’t want to have the same problem with Rimbaud, or Lautréamont, but in the end I lost those books too.

  To search for those copies or similar copies, the same font, the same layout, the same plot, the dark or bright syntax, somehow forces me to remember a time when I was young and poor and careless, though I know that the same copies, the exact same ones, will never be found, and to set myself such a task would be like marching into Florida in search of El Dorado.

  Even so, I often browse used bookstores, sorting through stacks of books left behind by others or sold in a dark moment, and in corners like these I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than thirty years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn’t read anyway, because I’ve already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he’s buried.

  But books have nothing to do with greed, though they do have something to do with coins. Books are like ghosts. Another tray of empanadas! Happy 2003! Music, maestro!

  TRANSLATION IS AN ANVIL

  What is it that makes an author, so beloved by those of us who speak Spanish, a figure of the second or third rank, if not an absolute unknown, among those who speak other languages? The case of Quevedo, as Borges reminds us, is perhaps the most flagrant. Why isn’t Quevedo a living poet, by which I mean a poet worthy of being reread and reinterpreted and imitated in spheres outside of Spanish literature? Which leads directly to another question: Why do we ourselves consider Quevedo to be our greatest poet? Or why are Quevedo and Góngora our two greatest poets?

  Cervantes, who in his lifetime was disparaged and looked down upon, is our greatest novelist. Regarding this there is almost no debate. He’s also the greatest novelist — and according to some, the inventor of the novel — in lands where Spanish isn’t spoken and where the work of Cervantes can for the most part only be read in translation. The various translations may be good or they may not be, which hasn’t prevented the essence of Don Quixote from being imprinted on or filtered into the imagination of thousands of readers, who don’t care about the verbal riches or the rhythm or force of Cervantine prose, a prose that any translation, no matter how good, obviously distorts or dissolves.

  Sterne owes much to Cervantes, and in the nineteenth century, the century of the novel par excellence, so does Dickens. Neither of the two, it almost goes without saying, spoke Spanish, by which one can deduce that they read the adventures of Don Quixote in English. The wonderful thing — and yet also the natural thing, in this case — is that those translations of Don Quixote, good or not, were able to convey what, in the case of Quevedo or Góngora, wasn’t conveyable and probably never will be: the quality that distinguishes an absolute masterpiece from an ordinary masterpiece, or, if such a thing exists, the quality that distinguishes a living literature, a literature that belongs to all mankind, from a literature that’s only the heritage of a certain tribe or a part of a certain tribe.

  Borges, who wrote absolute masterpieces, explained it once already. Here’s the story: Borges goes to the theater to see a production of Macbeth. The translation is terrible, the production is terrible, the actors are terrible, the staging is terrible. Even the seats are uncomfortable. And yet when the lights go down and the play begins, the spectators, Borges among them, are immersed once again in the fate of characters who traverse time, shivering once again at what for lack of a better word we can call magic.

  Something similar happens with the popular Passion plays, in which the eager amateur actors who once a year stage the crucifixion of Christ manage to transcend the most dreadful absurdity or unconscious heresy on the wings of divine mystery, which isn’t actually divine mystery but art.

  How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.

  HUMOR IN THE WINGS

  Cortázar complained that there was no tradition of erotic literature in Latin America. He could have just as well have comp
lained about the lack of a comic tradition. The classics, for lack of a better name — I mean the classics of our developing countries — sacrificed humor in favor of saccharine romanticism and pedagogy, or in some cases protest. None of these works stand the passage of time very well and if they survive, they owe their endurance to the efforts of the bibliophile rather than to any real value or substance.

  In the work of some early modernists or vanguardists, however, one can find instances of genuine humor. They’re scarce, but they’re real. I’m thinking about Tablada, a few obscure texts by Amado Nervo, fragments of prose by Darío, tales of horror and comedy by Lugones, the first forays of Macedonio Fernández. It’s possible — especially in the case of Nervo — that this humor is involuntary. There are also excellent prose writers and poets in whose work humor is striking for its absence. Martí is the great example of this kind of writer, despite The Golden Age.

  It could be said that in rural, provincial Latin America humor was an exercise in decadence and that it was only reborn with the mass arrival of immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century. Our forbears, who in intellectual matters were almost always boors, were unfamiliar with Voltaire and Diderot and Lichtenberg, and, even worse, they had never read — or scarcely read, or only claimed to have read, lying through their teeth — the Archpriest of Hita, Cervantes, Quevedo.